Her voice filled his mind, becoming a soliloquy of sound unlike anything he had ever heard. It was more than temptation borne upon the breeze; her whispers spun his thoughts and made his heart hammer. It didn’t matter that he could neither understand the language she spoke nor hear her intelligibly enough to even make out distinct words. The melody of her voice drew him forward and, with each step he took, the sound of her voice seemed to grow sweeter, though inexplicably softer.
The barren terrain stretched out before him, an expanse as empty as his life had been until the moment he’d chosen to step through the portal. The sky over head was the only thing that moved, awash in a perpetual motion of countless points of light. As he trudged across fields of pebbles and shale, time stretched out and his anticipation grew. He walked for what felt like hours, but appeared to make little or no progress. He neither seemed any closer to the shimmering horizon, nor any farther from the point where he’d started.
Then, in the distance, a shape appeared against the star-jeweled horizon. A lissome silhouette he could just barely see through the scintillating atmosphere. It was enough to make him quicken his pace. Each rhythmic step seemed to mirror his rushing pulse, though why such excitement thrilled through him, he had no idea. The figure was indistinct, outlined against the pulsating light of the rosy-amethyst horizon, and it didn’t seem to move or even react to him.
Focused on crossing the morass of dark, undulating ground, he didn’t notice the twinkling lights that hovered closer and closer around him like a thick swarm of insects. Aware only of the horizon that never seemed to grow closer and the whispering voice of the figure he pursued, he ignored everything else. Ignored the moisture of the atmosphere that beaded on his skin like shimmering sequins of blue and green. Ignored the slurking sound that had begun following him.
The only thing that mattered was her voice. It was beguilingly close, as if she stood right beside him speaking ever so quietly in his ear, though she stood at the limits of his visual perception. He knew she was calling to him, though her language perplexed him. He wasn’t even sure if it was a language or, perhaps, some form of nonverbal communication. A song of tone and intonation alone.
Unable to concentrate on the irregular terrain while her voice beguiled and clouded his thinking, he stumbled more than once, but he couldn’t keep his attention focused on his feet. What’s more, the longer he walked, the more unusual the sensation of walking seemed to become. Certainly, it was an ill-conceived idea to walk across such jumbled terrain without looking where he was putting his feet, but he felt suddenly very awkward and ungainly. He tripped repeatedly.
As he trudged across the expanse, his boots scrunching into the dry gravel and kicking up swaths of dust that coiled upward into the sparkling air like smoke curling from an extinguished flame, the velvety surface began to heave behind him. Like concentric rings that spread outward from a source of disturbance, the undulating ground took on the appearance of dark water.
No, not water. The soil itself moved like a viscous bog, slogging outward from each step he took; outward and upward. It was only when he glanced down to reorient himself that he happened to notice a gelatinous tendril reaching up behind him, grasping at his boot, but it was enough to distract him from the melodious inducement singing in his mind. Before he could figure out what was happening, however, a second ropy tentacle of velvety slime clutched upward at him and entwined itself around his ankle.
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Words and Art by ~Morgan~
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